Back losing teams and oppose winning ones

The former England manager Graham Taylor has a saying: "When you are winning, you are seldom as good as you hope you are. And when you are losing, you are seldom as bad as you fear you are."

It is true. And it contains a potentially profitable insight for football bettors. You can only win money in the long run by betting when the odds are wrong. The odds are most likely to be wrong when they are moved by an actual or anticipated weight of money. Ask yourself: which team are most people going to want to bet on in this match? If the odds are ever going to be wrong in your favour, it will almost certainly be the odds on the less fancied team.

It can sometimes pay, therefore, to oppose sides who are said to be in form and support those who are said to be out of form. In and out of form often means little more than in or out of luck.

A team who finish mid-table are likely during the season to have at least one sequence of eight games without a defeat, and another of eight games without a victory. Toward the end of those sequences, you can be sure that bookmakers and their customers will be thinking these teams are getting a lot better or worse, but neither will be correct.

In the Premiership and Football League during the last 10 seasons, fewer than half of all teams who had won their previous six games won the next one, and fewer than half of all teams who had lost their previous six games lost the next one. Many of those teams on winning runs would have been genuinely good, and vice versa.

When teams start posting unusual results, ask yourself: is there a reason? If there is not, you might have discovered a decent betting proposition.

Over the next few weeks, it is likely that current form teams such as Southend United, Carlisle United and Grimsby Town will stop winning every league game and struggling teams such as Everton, Hull City, Gillingham and Swindon Town will stop losing.